Lady Gaga 'In Early Talks' to Join Musical JOKER Sequel

Joaquin Phoenix's Joker may be returning to the big screen with a very A-list sidekick.

Accoring to a new report in The Hollywood Reporter. Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award-winner Lady Gaga is currently in early talks to join the film's cast.

The report has also indicated that the sequel to the billion-dollar grossing original could be a musical.

Though details about Gaga's potential character are scarce, early speculation points to the clown princess of crime, Harley Quinn.

In the Batman canon, Quinn begins her journey as Harleen Quinzel, an Arkham Asylum therapist who falls in love with Joker and joins him as his oft-abused love interest and villainous sidekick. Todd Phillips' original 2019 film left the film's central character, Arthur Fleck/Joker in the care of a psychiatric facility.

The sequel also boasts the recently revealed title Joker: Folie à deux, a term referencing mental illness affecting two or more persons.

According to THR, star Joaquin Phoenix is deep in negotiations but has not yet signed on to return to the role which earned him a 2019 Academy Award for Best Actor.

Director Todd Phillips "Joker" centers around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips' exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham's fractured society.

A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night...but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a series of escalating events in this gritty character study.

The film stars Academy Award-winner Joaquin Phoenix alongside Oscar winner Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Marc Maron, Bill Camp, Glenn Fleshler, Shea Whigham, Brett Cullen, Douglas Hodge and Josh Pais. Joker was released in theaters nationwide October 4, 2019.

Lady Gaga has amassed an extraordinary 31 million global album sales and 171 million single sales, making her one of the best-selling musicians of all-time. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in 2018's "A Star is Born". She won Academy and Golden Globe Awards for co-writing the hit song, "Shallow" from A Star Is Born.

Gaga is one of the biggest living forces in social media with more than 59 million likes on Facebook, over 72 million followers on Twitter and more than 31 million followers on Instagram. Her fifth studio album, Joanne, was released in October 2016 and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200, marking her fourth consecutive No. 1 album - the first female to do so in the last seven years. Lady Gaga has also seen incredible touring success with Live Nation producing and promoting all of her tours since The Monster Ball tour (2009-2011), which was the highest-grossing tour for a debut artist in history. Since then, she's also entertained fans with her Born This Way Ball tour (2012-2013); the 2014 ArtRave: The ARTPOP Ball tour, and her 2015 tour collaboration with Tony Bennett.